A Microphone converts air pressure variations of a sound wave into an electrical signal. A variety of methods may be used to convert a sound wave into an electrical signal, such as use of a coil of wire with a diaphragm suspended in a magnetic field, use of a vibrating diaphragm as a capacitor plate, use of a crystal of piezoelectric material, or use of a permanently charged material. Conventional microphones may sense sound waves from all directions (e.g. omni microphone), in a 3D axis symmetric figure of eight pattern (e.g. dipole microphone), or primarily in one direction with a fairly large pickup pattern (e.g. cardioid, super cardioid and hyper cardioid microphones).
In audio and video conferencing applications involving multiple participants in a given location, uni-directional microphones are undesired. In addition, participants desire speech intelligibility and sound quality without requiring a multitude of microphones placed throughout a conference room. Placing a plurality of microphones in varying locations within a room requires among other things, lengthy cables, cable management, and additional hardware.
Further, conventional microphone arrays require sophisticated and costly hardware, significant computing performance, complex processing, and may nonetheless lack adequate sound quality when compared to use of multiple microphones placed throughout a room. Moreover, conventional microphone arrays may experience processing artifacts caused by high-frequency spatial aliasing issues.